cliff negotiations in washington, d.c. nbc's mike viqueira is standing by on capitol hill. mike, i guess the big head line to come out of this other than the old christmas adage about the ifs, ands, buts, is the fact it's tied mainly to negotiation? >> yeah, if you spend any time around here, andy, two things are going to happen to you as a reporter, you're going to be insulted by john boehner, and you're going to hear him say ifs ands and buts were nuts -- would you put something on the floor that didn't have a majority of republicans to vote for? that really is a threshold question. what he's asking, would you allow a vote on allowing those tax rates for the richest mer e americans to go up, would you allow the house of representatives to vote on it? hedging response from speaker john boehner which is in itself interesting. basically what we have here, back to square one. there's no visible movement. i'm told over the course of yesterday there were no phone calls. whatever meetings or conversations took place, it went ab